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EDGE vs GPRS

I live in the outskirts of STL (no 3G love here yet). The other day I noticed that my cell phone is showing Edge (E) instead of GPRS (G) on the top. It has been showing E since. For as long as I can remember it has always showed G at my house. I once drove glancing at my phone and went about 4-5 miles before my phone "hit" G.

I am crossing my fingers here... Should this give me any hope that when STL gets 3G in the future that my house location could possibly get 3G? I have been holding off purchasing a new cell phone until STL gets 3G because of this.

Your the second one i saw mention about going from gprs to edge lately. I wonder if they are doing some edge expansion. That would be nice! When i leave the metro area, i get gprs. And it sucks! Can't we get some love for western Illinois? lol.

Your the second one i saw mention about going from gprs to edge lately. I wonder if they are doing some edge expansion. That would be nice! When i leave the metro area, i get gprs. And it sucks! Can't we get some love for western Illinois? lol.

Yeah, I think they are. The tower I'm on at my house was upgraded to EDGE about 6 months ago after being GPRS for the 4 years I'd lived here prior to that.

Your the second one i saw mention about going from gprs to edge lately. I wonder if they are doing some edge expansion. That would be nice! When i leave the metro area, i get gprs. And it sucks! Can't we get some love for western Illinois? lol.

T-Mobile lack of EDGE coverage is still the case in a majority of the south plains. The only exceptions are towns/cities supported by T-Mobile corporate stores.
T-Mobile seems to neglect much of their network, but still has no agreements with AT&T in many areas either...
T-Mobile should work with AT&T on in-market roaming again.

Originally Posted by Barciur

Everyone will get 3G/LTE eventually

T-Mobile's network (as well as AT&T's network and probably a good portion of the regional GSM carriers) will eventually go 3GSM and [hopefully] LTE, but that'll take forever and a day for that to happen. Look how long it took for TDMA to get phased out for GSM, or for analog to be mostly phased out (there's a few providers that told the FCC they'll be continuing to operate analog)...

Take consideration that Alltel/VZW owns a bunch of roaming coverage in the western US. It's unlikely they'll decide to upgrade the roamer network into 3GSM (unless it is profitable to do so), but likely will upgrade it to VZW-native LTE.

The only good thing i see with t-mobile gprs is it is a constant 40 or so kbps. With edge, i can get 20kbps upto 200kbps. Not constant. Thankfully 3g seems to be steady at 1100kbps for me.

this is very true in my experiences. Here we have GPRS only and it used to be so all over town, but recently TMO went on a mad streak and upped about 5 or 6 sites to EDGE, but heres the kicker, did nothing on the backend. go figure. so i can get consistent 40kbps on GPRS but on EDGE i might get 20kbps, 30 if i am favored by the boys in pink, but I will credit them that they did do one site proper that is going to be outside of my dorm next year with "proper" EDGE rockin at ~110kbps consistently, which will turn into a good fallback for tethering to bypass the schools filter. but even in Pensacola Beach, FL i was downloading large amounts of data on EDGE as we rode on the bus and yes i peaked at almost 32KBps down, it averaged around 3KBps from my condo with full bars, so the potential is there, but only in bursts. tis frustrating!

"eventually"
T-mobile eventually will bankrupt or be purchased by other company

You sure do like to troll your contempt for TMO in every thread, don't you? And yet you keep them as your operator...

Originally Posted by danska

The only good thing i see with t-mobile gprs is it is a constant 40 or so kbps. With edge, i can get 20kbps upto 200kbps. Not constant. Thankfully 3g seems to be steady at 1100kbps for me.

Here in STL, I stream 128kbps shoutcast stations all day long on EDGE. The only time I have issues is when I'm driving on the highways and switching between towers frequently. I guess this just depends on your area.

Originally Posted by Barciur

Well wouldn't it be great if T-Mobile offered a "roaming plan" where they would allow in-market roaming on AT&T for extra charge...

That would be good, but i'm not sure how many people would pay more just for some more EDGE coverage. I highly doubt TMO would make an agreement for 3g roaming considering the frequency differences between the two networks, and possible negative consequences in AWS 3g phone development and sales.

I doubt I'd subscribe to the offer, however (no matter how cheap) because I already get EDGE, and in my opinion, ATT's network quality is inferior to TMO's in every metric (dropped calls, signal strength, voice quality/clarity, etc).

Perhaps not many, but definetely people that live in rural areas with very spotty T-Mobile GSM coverage would just to be able to use AT&T signal.

I agree in principle, but there are many rural areas even AT&T doesn't cover but T-Mobile does (Parts of New Mexico, some highways in north/central NV), and an incredible amount of area in the Plains and Rockies that neither have native coverage.

AT&T as a whole doesn't have a ton of remote (i.e. not within a dozen miles or so from a town or metro) rural coverage, but agreeably has more than T-Mobile (which is mostly urban anyway). Most of their rural coverage came from acquiring rural operators (Dobson, Farmers, parts of Unicel come to mind recently), not of their own expansion...
Even then, AT&T somewhat neglects their rural networks to focus more on the larger, urban parts of it.

Many of those areas upsurped by AT&T still have active roaming agreements with T-Mobile due to contractual agreements pre-acquision... that's the case here in OK with the former Dobson coverage area.

Roaming in many rural-esque areas depend more on regional/partner GSM networks than AT&T. I think that's what T-Mobile is more worried about right now w.r.t their roaming agreements.